Perhaps I ought to say one word about the beauty of the gorges. I think in two points they excel. First, in the height of the massive cliffs, through which the Yangtsze has cut its way like a knife; the size of the river and the size of the cliffs are so much in proportion that the eagle circling above the gorge looks like a swallow, and the crowd of trackers appears as a disturbed ant colony. The other way in which the gorges excel in beauty is in colouring; at one point especially it was most remarkable—the rocks were red, the mountains when we saw them were purple, and the purple and red harmonising with the fresh green foliage of early summer and the deep yellow of the river, made a rich combination of tints in the landscape which could hardly be surpassed. It is typical of the state in which China is at the present day that a scheme should be on foot for building a railway which no doubt will render the gorges of the Yangtsze a silent highway, and, instead of hearing the wild song of the tracker or the savage beating of the tom-tom, the lonely eagle will circle above a silent river on which the fisherman's bark alone will sail in the future.
For all schemes to tame the wild and fierce Yangtsze are clearly impossible. The river rises and falls more than a hundred feet with great rapidity, and no human hand could ever throw a dam across this mass of surging water. Possibly it might be used as a source of power for electrical work, but it is far more probable that the smaller rivers which fall into the Yangtsze will be chosen for that purpose. This district may be a tourist resort, and dwellers in the plains of China may seek coolness and beauty on one of the crags that overhang the river; the modern hotel may perch itself beside the ancient Buddhist temple; but the days of the river as a great commercial route of China are numbered as soon as the railway linking far-western Szechuan to the rest of China is completed. One wild scheme proposes that the railway should come from Russia straight down from Szechuan, in which case more than probably Szechuan will fall completely under the influence of the Russian Government.
One of the results of Westernising China must be to produce an industrial revolution. All those men, for instance, who make a living by leaping from crag to crag, from rock to rock, and swimming, struggling, rowing in that river Yangtsze will find their living gone. But not only will the railway make many poor who had a competence, but it must make many rich who before were poor. In this case, for instance, all those commodities which are now extremely dear in Szechuan, because of the cost of transit, will fall in price, and there will be a period when there will be a wide margin of profit between the cost of importation and the conventional price the people are used to pay, and those who live by trade will grow rich.
What has happened in the West must also happen in the East. The introduction of steam did not make the official classes or even the working classes immediately rich. The people who immediately profited by improved means of production and communication were the great middle class; afterwards as the working class realised that the margin of profit would allow of larger wages, they compelled the masters to share these advantages with them. So it will probably happen in China. With the railway will come a rich middle class who will be a factor of growing importance in future China.
A great contrast between the Yangtsze and its wild gorges is the great trunk line from Peking to Canton which runs at right angles through the Yangtsze north and south, and must make Hankow, the place where it crosses the Yangtsze, one of the greatest cities in the whole world. The railway is only completed as far as Hankow. It runs from Peking right across the plains of China, which are so desolate in the spring and so fertile in the summer, and which depend for their fertility on the July rains. At every station a great Chinese inn is erected—that is to say, a big courtyard with rooms round. At first, of course, trade was small; the Chinese village community has but little that it wants either to buy or sell; each community is to a great extent self-supporting. A farmer reckoned, I was told by a Chinese official, that if he had made 30s. a year, he had done well. That does not mean that he lived on 30s. a year, though in a country where men are paid threepence a day, one would almost have been ready to believe it; but it means that he had fifteen dollars a year to spend on things outside his daily food. His farm supplies him with food and drink and his vicious luxury, opium; his women make his clothes; it only remains for him to buy material for the clothes and the little extras that they cannot make, besides salt. He pays for the few things that he has bought, probably with the opium he produces, or in Manchuria with beans; but the trade has been of microscopical dimensions owing to the difficulties of transit.
When the railway is made he finds at the railway inn the Chinese merchant ready to buy and sell anything that he on his part is ready to trade. At first, such things as sewing cotton and cigarettes are the things that are traded against silk or opium, and then comes Chinese medicine and mineral oil, and so trade begins, and soon the Chinese inn becomes a market-place, and the railways begin carrying goods.
Of course the full development of the railway system must depend on the feeding lines and in what we had in Europe before the railway system, and what the Chinese have not got, the feeding roads. In Manchuria—for China, like England, is more go-ahead in the north than in the south—they are already moving in this direction. The Russian railways, possessed now by the Japanese, are very busy carrying beans to Dalny, and soon the Japanese lines from Mukden to Antung will be equally busy, and the line from Mukden to Tientsin also will carry this crop. What they are now considering at Mukden is how they can arrange a feeding system of light railways, by which a bigger area of ground can be brought within reach of the railway system. To give some idea of the energy and progressive character of the officials in those parts, I may mention that they are already making inquiries as to the mono-rail system for such railways.
The Chinese have made up their minds to welcome railways, and though they would far prefer railways to be built with Chinese capital, they are of necessity compelled to accept European capital, since their fellow-countrymen want very high interest for their money. The Germans have taken very full advantage of the Chinese desire for railways, and have linked Kiauchau with the railway system of China.
The effect of all this must be very far reaching. To begin with, it will alter the influence of foreign powers. As the railway service is completed, Kiauchau will become a very much more important centre than it is now. If a railway that links Peking to Nanking, or, to be accurate, to a town on the Yangtsze opposite to Nanking, is cut by a railway from Kiauchau, the result will be that Kiauchau will become the nearest ice-free port for an enormous district of China. This cannot fail to strengthen the German influence, and the German influence is connected, as we have already explained, too much with that political side of missions which has caused them to be distrusted by peace-loving Chinese. The Chinese will ask themselves, will there not soon be a missionary incident which will justify a further aggression by Germany along the railway, which lies so handy for a military advance, and they will be suspicious of any German missionary effort in that quarter.
But the effect of the railways is much more far reaching than any casual advantage that it may give to various powers, whether it be to Germany in Shantung, or to Russia or Japan in Manchuria, or to France in Yunnan, or to Russia in Szechuan. It will have two main effects. First and foremost it must place the whole of China in the same position that Shanghai and Tientsin occupy at the present moment—that is, it must make the whole of China a mixture of Eastern and Western civilisation. It may be urged that the rivers of China have already been the means of bringing East and West into close contact with one another, and yet that China remains still a separate and different country to the treaty ports.